Was TiVo’s Patent Expert Witness Testimony Contradictory?

Dish Network asked a federal appeals court this past week to rehear the TiVo patent-infringement case, alleging that a TiVo expert witness gave contradictory testimony. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the lower court’s ruling that Dish violated TiVo’s “Time Warp” software patent and affirmed the judgment against the satellite operator for $94 million in damages. Dish said this week that one of TiVo’s patents expert witnesses contradicted himself and argued that the infringement verdict was not “supported by substantial evidence.” Broadcastnewsroom.com also reports:

EchoStar argued that a TiVo expert witness, Jerry Gibson, testified at one point that a Broadcom chip in Dish’s digital video recorder included software that extracted audio and video from a physical data source (a process he said pertained to the Time Warp patent). At another point, however, Gibson identified the Dish DVR’s “Ioctl command” as the software that extracted audio and video ” a command, according to Dish, that’s handled by a separate data-buffering memory chip, not the Broadcom chip. “The two parts of Dr. Gibson’s testimony the [appeals court] panel considered are thus in conflict,” Dish said in its petition. In a statement, TiVo said: “This appeal was expected and we remain confident we will prevail in this appeal.”